


You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Beauty and the Beast Elements, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 06:25:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16153451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: Willas has been unceasingly patient with her. It’s a patience she doesn’t entirely deserve. She growls at him more often that she speaks sweetly, snaps at his kind words and thoughtful gestures like a wolf in a trap. It’s only that she would so hate to be pitied by him. Her pride has always been a living thing, and being so out of place has only made it worse. If feeling clumsy and ugly compared to Sansa had stung, feeling clumsy and ugly compared to Margaery Tyrell, to her cousins, even her elderly grandmother is like swallowing needles.If her actual marriage was a reprieve, she might not be so beastly, but Willas is as pretty as any of them. She tries to imagine anyone calling him Horseface, as Jeyne Poole did her, and can only laugh at the thought. Years and leagues away from home and still she’s the ugly one.





	You Could Make This Place Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> For the asoiafrarepairs prompt: Willas x Arya Beauty and the Beast AU
> 
> This is probably not what the prompter had in mind, but it's what popped into my head.

Flowers. Everything Arya had ever known about the Tyrells had to do flowers – their coat of arms, their words, their knights, the products of their lands. Whenever she and Sansa had lessons on the Great Houses together, Sansa always sighed happily at the very idea of a place filled with flowers and prettiness.

Unsurprisingly, it was Arya’s least favorite among the Great Houses, which makes it all the more unfair that she’d ended up married into it when it should have been Sansa in her place, Sansa who would have fit seamlessly here in this beautiful keep with its beautiful people. Sansa is somewhere far from here, though, somewhere unknown, and it’s Arya who is a weed among the roses, a squab amidst the swans.

Willas has been unceasingly patient with her. It’s a patience she doesn’t entirely deserve. She growls at him more often that she speaks sweetly, snaps at his kind words and thoughtful gestures like a wolf in a trap. It’s only that she would so hate to be pitied by him. Her pride has always been a living thing, and being so out of place has only made it worse. If coming up lacking in comparison to Sansa had stung, coming up lacking in comparison to Margaery Tyrell, to her cousins and even her elderly grandmother, is like swallowing needles.

If her actual marriage was a reprieve, she might not be so beastly all the time, but Willas is as pretty as any of them. She tries to imagine anyone calling him Horseface, as Jeyne Poole did her, and can only laugh at the thought. Years and leagues away from home and still she’s the ugly one. 

*

The first time he kisses her – properly, on the lips, as he’d done nothing more than kiss the back of her hand when they were wed – she can only stare at him. He stares back at her, his face warm and open, his hand gentle on her shoulder. A hundred questions are on her lips: _Why would you do that?, Why_ did _you do that?, Do you want to do that again?, Do_ I _want you to do that again?_ She asks none of them. She only runs, far and fast and hard, until she collapses in a red-faced panting heap in some far corner of the keep, and still her mind races on and on and on.

The second time he kisses her, she kisses him back before she runs.

The third time he kisses her, she doesn’t run.

*

She’s sixteen by the time he’s willing to consummate their marriage. It’s nothing she thought it would be. She’d always imagined marital coupling happening at night, something solemn carried out in furtive shadows and hushed tones. Instead Willas leads her to his bed when they return from the afternoon ride that’s become their habit. He touches her and encourages her touch in return and they come together in sunshine and laughter. What makes that day different in his eyes from the others that came before, Arya doesn’t know, but it doesn’t seem to matter when she’s lying in his bed with his head on her bare breast, his breath feathering across her skin and raising gooseflesh in its wake. She knows that every day from now on will be different. She knows that this marks her life as before and after in a way she doesn’t quite understand.

Half of Arya thinks she would have pressed him to do it sooner, his honorability be damned, if she’d only known how good he could make her feel. The other half knows she wasn’t ready for it. As it is, she still struggles with unwieldy new desires, sometimes wanting to push him away almost as desperately as she wants to wrap herself in him like she would a fur cloak in the dead of winter. In some ways, she misses the simple truths of childhood, the certainly she felt in a body that was a tool to be used as she pleased, a body that did not betray her with yearnings and changes and strangeness. Back then, she’d despaired at how she could never measure up to Sansa, in face or manner or feminine skill. Now she despairs at how unruly her secret thoughts can be, at how her body is no longer entirely hers to command. But with every new thing Willas shows her, every unknown truth she’d never imagined could be part of coupling, she knows she couldn’t go back to the child she was, even if she wanted to. 

*

One day, she works up the courage to show him her water dancing, after they’ve brought a basket with their midday meal to share in one of Highgarden’s many orchards. She has no suitable blade, so she demonstrates with only a long stick, which would make her feel foolish if she didn’t feel so _naked_ , more naked than she’s ever felt while coupling with him. She throws the stick into the underbrush when she’s done, wiping her hands on her breeches as if to erase herself entirely, and it’s only the admiration on his face that keeps her from turning tail and running.

“Marvelous,” he says with real enthusiasm, making her cheeks heat with commingled embarrassment and pleasure. She’s gruff in response, still unable to soften with him when she’s at her most vulnerable. 

“My brother had a sword made for me when I was a child. We called it Needle.” Willas smiles. 

“Your own sort of needlework,” he says, and Arya’s belly burns with the overwhelming sensation of being seen. She makes some excuse and flees, intending to stay away from him for some days, until the queer ache goes away and she can look at him without feeling confused, but she slips into his room and crawls into his bed late that night, stripping her shift off over her head and taking control in a way she’s never dared before. He submits to her easily, even happily, not minding when she yanks at his sleep tunic or pulls at his hair, too wild to be a lady, too old to be a girl. He murmurs words she can’t hear against her breastbone, punctuating them with his lips and tongue, with his mouth at her breast and his fingers between her legs. He gentles her and she lets him, confused, aching, yearning for something she doesn’t know how to name.

It’s safer in the dark. In the dark they’re equally lovely and unlovely, real and unreal. In the dark, there’s nothing to remind them of who they are in the light.

*

It’s easiest when they’re alone. When she’s around his family, it’s as if she’s still bound by the girl she was when she came to them, snarling and wounded, as prickly as a briar patch, as sour as a lemon. It sits strangely with her new awareness of him. The slightest knowing look from Margaery, and Arya’s pulse races, her stomach dips, and she feels a sensation akin to panic. It’s something she hasn’t felt since King’s Landing. Strange that someone knowing she _likes_ her husband should feel as dangerous as the Lannisters. 

When they’re alone, Arya can be soft, hard, scared, safe, anything. Willas lets her be anything at all, without even a hint of judgment or condemnation. She’s never known anyone like him, not even Jon, who accepted her in ways no one else ever did. Jon would like him, she thinks sometimes. He would be happy that such a man is her husband.

*

Last night, he made her howl like the wolf she is. 

“I don’t need working legs to do this,” he’d said, looking fierce and painfully beautiful in the frame of her thighs, his skin like gold in the firelight, his hair wild from the greedy grasping of her hands. She would have protested his self-deprecation had not her voice fled completely at the first touch of his tongue between her legs. She’d writhed and squirmed and panted, the red of her cheeks matching the red furrows she’d scratched down his back with clawed fingers. It had been too intimate by half. She’d wanted to hide under the covers almost as much as she wanted him to do it all again. Then he had, and that’s precisely what she did, burying her face in furs even as she squeezed her thighs around his head. 

Luckily that didn’t keep him from moving his mouth. It’s all she’s thought about since, all morning and all day, when they broke their fast on bread and jam after rising so late it was nearly midday, when they rode out among the hills that suddenly resembled nothing so much as the contours of her own bent knees with Willas between them, even now as they sit at supper with his family, everyone acting as if the world isn’t more overwhelming and amazing than it was just the day before, before Arya knew what Willas’s tongue could do.

What she’s thinking must show on her face because as soon as Willas looks at her over the table, his eyes go wide and dark and he turns a delicate shade of pink.

 _”Even that’s prettier on him than it would be on me,”_ Arya thinks, and can’t decide if she likes that or not.

That night, when he lowers his face between her thighs again, Arya decides that she likes it all quite a lot, his mouth on her, his blush, anything at all that has to do with him.

*

It’s different in Highgarden, different in so many ways. In Winterfell there had always been some task to do, some lesson to learn. Only now, compared to Highgarden’s leisure, is she realizing how austere that life had been. Still she misses it with a longing keener than a blade’s edge, even as she revels in the novelty of play. Of potential and growth and blossoming. 

“Do you wish I weren’t crippled?” Willas asks one afternoon as they while away the day in his bed, even calling for food to his rooms so they needn’t get up or disentangle from each other for longer than a moment, a luxury Arya never could have imagined before coming here. She thinks on his question for several moments, though she doesn’t truly need to. For his own sake, perhaps she would wish such a thing, but not for hers. It occurs to her suddenly that maybe he feels as out of place as she always has. In his mind, perhaps it’s not Arya but himself who is the thorn among the roses, the squab among swans. It almost makes her laugh, the thought of the two of them circling each other, each thinking themselves lacking in their own ways. Each feeling the beastly outlier in a world of perfection, unaware that the other feels the same.

“Do you wish I were beautiful?” she asks instead of answering. Her finger traces idle patterns on his chest, her cheek damp and warm where it’s pressed to his skin. He answers her with patterns of his own, drawn on her bare shoulder in delicate filigree.

“Do you think you aren’t?” he asks, and something about it makes Arya warm all the way to her toes. She tilts her head up to kiss him in response, deep and hot, telling him with her body that he’s exactly as she wishes him to be.

It’s only later, as he twitches the furs around them when the drying sweat on her skin makes her shiver in the cooling air, that she begins to think maybe she’s exactly as she wishes to be too.

*

Another day, another afternoon spent learning each other, learning themselves. Another day of pleasure that could make Arya feel guilty for how little it allows room for anything else.

“Do you think you might ever come to love me?” Willas asks her. She hears the wistfulness in his voice, the hope and the pain and the sweetness. She hears his voice break when she takes him in her hand, guides him inside her, hears his breathing catch and his heart call hers when she wraps her legs around his waist and meets his every thrust like it’s the only thing that could save her life.

Could she love him? Arya laughs and holds him tighter. She doesn’t tell him that she already does. Not yet.

 

****

_Title from "Good Bones" by Maggie Smith_


End file.
